In a comment to my earlier posting on RSS evangelism, my colleague Barbara Feldman (who publishes the hugely popular site and newsletter Surfing the Net with Kids), mentioned a service called Bloglines. Alan Levine also commented on Bloglines in that same thread.
It sounded like it might be a good thing for RSS newbies, so I checked it out. It is pretty cool.
Bloglines is a free Web-based RSS feed aggregator. You just set up an account and subscribe to feeds, and then you can access your personal library of feeds from any computer that has Web access. (Not bad, if you don’t carry your laptop around with you.) This gets around my #1 complaint about RSS – that you have to install special software (a feed reader) in order to get RSS feeds.
You can subscribe to feeds through the Bloglines site, or use a little “Subscribe with Bloglines” button that they give you to add to your browser’s links bar to add a feed to your Bloglines account no matter where you happen to be on the Web when you find it. Obviously, this will only work when you’re on your own computer, not on a public net access terminal somewhere, but it’s still cool – although it does pull you out of the site you were looking at and shoot you over to Bloglines to do it. Not sure I like that.
Bloglines is the brainchild of Mark Fletcher, the guy who founded eGroups way back then. (I really used to like eGroups, until Yahoo bought it.)
All in all, Bloglines seems to me a good option for RSS newbies – but the entrepreneur in me is screaming “Yo! What’s the business model? Why do this for free?” I’m very wary of free online services, they have a tendency to croak just when I’ve grown to depend on them.
Interestingly, on July 19, 2003, a LaughingMeme blog item raised exactly this concern – and Mark Fletcher himself commented with a very thoughtful response. Well worth reading if you’re considering using Bloglines.
The bottom line is: I think Bloglines is good to try. Give it a shot. It’s useful, it’s easy, and it’s free. It may work well for the long haul even. But if you use it a lot, I would back up your list of feeds elsewhere, just in case.
If you liked my post, feel free to subscribe to my rss feeds
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